It started, as most moral panics do, on morning television. In March, 1983, Dr. Richard Smith sat down with Frank Bough, the tawny host of the BBC’s Breakfast Time, to discuss his study, “Sun Beds and Melanoma,” recently published in the British Medical Journal. Pale and earnest, Smith described the risks of both ultraviolet radiation and mutagenic exposure. Bough listened and glistened, evincing enough interest not to offend his guest and enough skepticism not too offend his audience.
In her new book The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain – sure to sell tens of copies –historian Fabiola Creed describes what happened next. The Daily Mail ran all caps headlines and The Times sniffed at the vulgarity of it all. Dermatologists, happy to field calls from journalists, piled on. It took a few years, but eventually the scolds settled on a neologism for all those working-class women in Essex and gay men in Manchester: tanorexics1.
This kind of thing happens all the time. It’s Mountain Dew kills your sperm. It’s Pumpkin Spice Lattes contain antifreeze. Its McDonald’s fries don’t decompose.
The last acceptable form of class snobbery is science-based condescension toward middle-class people making unhealthy decisions. Critiques are dressed up in wellness lingo, but the real conversation is now and has always been about rationality. Science began as a gentleman’s pursuit defined against the self-interested bullshittery of men with commercial concerns, and it still carries vestigial traces of its evolution: linguistic austerity, institutional bias, and expert froideur. The result is often a dismissive and uninquisitive attitude toward mass culture. Dr. Smith wasn’t wrong on the data, but he was wrong about people. They want color. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is proof of this. It is also, ironically, a natural experiment testing whether the masses can behave with scientific rationally.
Maybe not.
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